Sara M. Federico

University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Sara M. Federico is a robotics researcher specializing in agricultural automation, with a focus on perception and manipulation for delicate fruit harvesting. Her work addresses the critical challenge of enabling robots to accurately detect, localize, and grasp fresh fruits in cluttered, unstructured environments—a task made difficult by occlusion, variable lighting, and the need for gentle handling. Federico’s major contributions include developing a novel method for refining 6D pose estimation from single RGB images using depth measurements from standard RGB-D cameras, achieving high accuracy even when trained solely on synthetic data. She has also pioneered the integration of non-prehensile manipulation actions and tactile sensing to improve grasping reliability. Her experimental comparisons of deep learning versus hybrid pose estimation algorithms provide valuable guidance for the robotics community. With her most-cited works accumulating over 17 citations since 2023, Federico is establishing herself as a rising voice in precision agriculture robotics, helping to bridge the gap between computer vision and real-world robotic dexterity.